Trump’s budget: Where’s the evidence?

President Donald Trump promised to run the government like a business, and the budget blueprint he released last week had one Big Business-inspired idea baked into it: Testing the evidence. The blueprint promised to figure out which government programs and agencies work, and eliminate the ones that don’t—“using real, hard data to identify poorly performing organizations and programs.”

Mick Mulvaney, the White House budget director, doubled down on that idea in a briefing last week, arguing that the Trump administration wasn’t going to ask for Americans’ money “unless we can guarantee to you that that money is actually being used in a proper function.”

Technocrats on the left and the right know this as “evidence-based policymaking,” and they love the idea. The vast majority of federal programs and agencies have never been rigorously evaluated, and only recently has the government started to get serious about trying to measure its results. Evidence-based policymaking has a lot of support in both parties: The Clinton and Bush administrations both tried to integrate evidence into policymaking, and the Obama administration went even further, reforming many grant programs so that projects that demonstrated effectiveness received more money. “It’s like a venture capital fund,” said Andrew Feldman, who worked on evidence-based policymaking in Obama’s budget office.

In theory, supporters should be cheered that Trump and his budget chief would take such a strong stand in favor of evidence. But how much did “evidence” really drive Trump’s budget? A POLITICO review of the cuts in the blueprint found a gap between its promises and what it really chose to cut and keep. Evidence-based policy is still rare in government, but the budget actually eliminates a handful of the few programs that have proven themselves cost effective. It also dodges evidence in some other ways, ignoring settled science or funding projects with low expected returns. In one situation, it proposes eliminating a program that’s right in the middle of getting a rigorous assessment.

The White House did not respond to questions about why it wanted to cut specific programs. (Update: After deadline, OMB communications director John Czwartacki said the blueprint shows Trump "isn’t afraid to drain the swamp and reassess federal programs" and "is keeping his promises to the American people to change Washington’s status quo.") And many in the evidence-based policy community suspect that the administration is using “evidence” as a fig leaf to cut whatever they wanted to cut in the first place. “Government definitely needs a haircut, but it doesn’t need the head lopped off,” said John Bridgeland, a lawyerwho served as head of George W. Bush’s Domestic Policy Council. He and others worry that the Trump administration’s loose use of “evidence” could ultimately undermine support for an idea that is still gaining ground in Washington, turning a rare area of bipartisan agreement into yet another political battlefield.

A look at a handful of cuts in the budget gives a sense of how evidence is starting to percolate into federal policymaking in different ways—and how the Trump budget, for all its surface commitment to evidence, steers around it when convenient.

• The Corporation for National and Community Service is a small agency (a budget just north of $1 billion) that funds AmeriCorps, the public service work program for the young, and Senior Corps, a similar program for older Americans. It also houses the Social Innovation Fund, which provides grants to nonprofits to improve economic opportunity, health and youth development. The CNCS has come out well in effectiveness measures: A 2013 study from Columbia University, for instance, found that the benefits of the community service programs, including CNCS-funded ones, well-exceed the costs.

But it also helps push evidence-based policy in other ways. The Social Innovation Fund provides grantees with money and technical assistance to evaluate their programs, building knowledge about what works and what doesn’t. They are grouped into three tiers of evidence of effectiveness—preliminary, moderate and strong—and required to reach the “moderate” tier by the end of the grant term. The CNCS also has an “evidence exchange” that contains more than 50 evaluations and case studies—all published within the past two years—of CNCS-funded programs. Results for America, an organization that promotes evidence-based policymaking, has found that the agency does a good job incorporating evidence and data into its activities. “It’s a great strategy,” said Ron Haskins, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who is the co-chair of the congressional commission on evidence-based policymaking. “You can't just dismiss this.”

The CNCS represents less than 2 percent of Trump’s cuts to domestic spending—and 0.02 percent of all government spending. The budget blueprint cuts it entirely.

• The pre-disaster mitigation program run by theFederal Emergency Management Agency gives money to state and local communities to reduce risks before future disasters. (This is the reverse of how FEMA usually operates, by swooping in for rescue and cleanup after a disaster has already occurred—at a huge cost.) These risk-reduction grants have turned out to be an excellent federal investment: one study estimated that for every $1 the government spent, it saved $4 in disaster costs later. The Congressional Budget Office has also found that benefits exceed the costs of the program. “It would be shocking to walk away from that program,” said Ali Zaidi, a former Obama OMB official who now is a senior adviser to Morrison & Foerster.

The Trump budget zeroes it out.The stated reason is simply that the program is unauthorized by Congress—but this is technically true of huge amounts of spending in the federal government. (As POLITICO documented in 2015, the entire State Department hasn’t been reauthorized for 15 years.)

• Choice Neighborhoods. This small project in the Department of Housing and Urban Development was launched in 2010 to redevelop distressed communities, and cost $125 million in fiscal 2016. The White House wants to eliminate the program, calling it a “low priority.” That label isn’t wrong—in fact it’s just an early-stage project meant to test what actually works in redevelopment of distressed communities. Already, twointerim evaluations of the program have shown promising results, but the final evaluation isn’t due until the end of next year.

If Choice Neighborhoods succeeds, housing experts say it could have much larger implications, providing an evidence-based way to help distressed neighborhoods. If it fails the final test, that’s also valuable information: It could prevent money from being spent the wrong way next time. Barbara Sard, a housing expert at the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, says the design “is almost unprecedented in these programs, which rarely have tried to evaluate both the process and the impact on people.” If the program is eliminated, it’s unclear if the final evaluation would even occur—meaning the government will actually have wasted money by gathering evidence it never uses.

• The Community Development Block Grant, a program within HUD,funds local projectsthat address a variety of challenges, including retaining local businesses and expanding affordable housing. Perhaps the best-known grantee is Meals on Wheels, which provides meals for seniors. It broke through in the budget news last week when Mulvaney said Meals on Wheels “sounds great” but was ineffective. “To take the federal money and give it to the states and say, ‘Look, we want to give you money for programs that don't work,’” he said, “I can't defend that anymore.” The blueprint argues that CDBG “is not well-targeted to the poorest populations and has not demonstrated results.”

Experts largely agree with that conclusion about the results: The CDBG program has never received a rigorous evaluation, partially because states and localities use the money for a variety of purposes, and it’s difficult to know what would and wouldn’t get funded in its absence. “You can’t hit the nail on the head with CDBG,” said William Shear of the Government Accountability Office. “It’s just difficult to do.” Of course, that also means there’s no evidence that the CDBG is ineffective, which means the White House would be hard-pressed to argue that it makes sense to defund it. As Bridgeland said more broadly about programs without clear track records, “We have to create an environment of continuous learning. We can’t just turn an on-off switch when we don’t know.”

Ironically, however, in choosing to target the Meals on Wheels portion of this program, Mulvaney may have crystallized just how selective the White House’s use of evidence is. In fact, many experts quickly pointed out, Meals on Wheels has shown clear effectiveness:A long string of studies indicates that Meals on Wheels and similar programs increase nutrient intake and reduces loneliness, among other benefits.

•The border wall. The budget also includes additional money to build Trump’s promised wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. This represents a genuinely new investment, and it doesn’t come cheap: Estimates for the total cost range from $14 billion to $50 billion. But as for evidence? It’s not clear that the wall would make much of a difference in illegal immigration. The southern border is already patrolled by federal immigration officials and high-tech drones, and the government has already installed fences at certain, high-risk sections of the border. With net migration from Mexico actually negative—that is, more Mexicans are currently leaving than coming to the U.S.—a long list of former Department of Homeland Security officials and lawmakers of both parties have argued that a wall across the entire border would waste scarce resources that could be better invested elsewhere. To the extent there’s evidence for the cost-effectiveness of a border wall, it seems to stack up in the other direction.

THE TRUMP BUDGET blueprint does clearly incorporate evidence into some of its budgetary decisions, including the elimination of the Education Department’s 21st Century Community Learning Centers, which cost more than $1 billion a year and a rigorous 2005 study found did little to help students. (Advocates hold that the study is out of date and the program has been improved since then.) The budget also proposed increased funding for apprenticeship programs and Reemployment and Eligibility Assessments, both of which have strong track records for reemploying the unemployed.

There are other ways for the federal government to use evidence in its decision-making, though, and it seems to ignore those as well. A key example is climate change: Last week, Mulvaney dismissed the idea that the federal government should continue spending money on programs and agencies that address climate change. “We're not spending money on that anymore,” he said. “We consider that to be a waste of your money.” In turn, the blueprint cuts the EPA’s budget by 31 percent and eliminates more than 50 programs. Other climate-related programs within the Department of Energy also are cut, including funding for international climate funds.

Are those evidence-based decisions? That’s unlikely; most of those programs, like most programs in the federal government overall, have never been evaluated. It’s more likely that Trump wants to eliminate the programs because he doesn’t believe in man-made climate change. That position, in some ways, is the ultimate in ignoring evidence: As politically appealing as it might be to his voters, it flatly contradicts the vast majority of scientific data—looking straight at the information available, and putting money somewhere else.